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So it's 2010, and I'm joining the rest of the country in fervently wishing it's a better year (and a better decade) that what's come before. But before I can put 2009 to bed, we need to determine who will win the much-sought-after "'Tard of the Year" award.

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Had to go with the crack pot that keep on giving, Michelle Bachman, who only recently stopped telling her constituents to boycott the census when she realized more than likely it'll be her congressional district that is chopped if Minnesota loses enough population (considered very likely).

Oo--Steve, I hadn't heard that one about Bachmann; that would be massive karma.

I have to say it: Sarah Palin can't be 'Tard Of The Year, and here's why--because SP's joke is and always shall be on us. In any other country, planet, or alternate dimension produced by butterfly-squashing time travelers, Sarah Palin would be a trailer-park resident, and I mean that most sincerely and not as snark or irony or a joke. She was a student athelete of limited ability and some few charms from a rural area who went through a succession of colleges because her Dad was a schoolteacher (and there's implied psychodrama between all the lines in that tale of a man who drags his family into the Alaskan wilds and seems to have been more than a little bit of a hard man) before marrying her blue-collar high-school sweetheart as soon as she could get enough wriggle room beneath her parents' thumbs. It's only a bit of cosmic weirdness and Alaska's strange, unique qualities that finds Palin graduating from fish-gutting baby-machine to City Councilwoman, the beginning of a long upward fall in which she stumbles, Chauncey Gardner-like, upwards into a state Governorship, VP nomination and likely Presidential bid.

The novel (not the movie) Forrest Gump has some wonderful, hysterical metafictional riffs on the "magical retard" literary trope, the mentally-challenged character who, via the narrator's conceits, is ironically wiser than the "able" people around him. (The book, if it had been written after the movie version was released, would be regarded as a parody of it.) So whither Sarah Palin, the "magical retard" of the real world, if there is one. How can we really label such a woman a "'tard" when she turns our wisdom against us, prevails against the long odds, and continuously fails upwards?

(Clarification on "went through a succession of colleges because her Dad was a schoolteacher"; I have no doubt in my mind that if Mrs. Palin's parents had been high school dropouts, she would have been one as well. And if her parents had been HS or college grads but hadn't been from what has to be described as America's intellectual class, I'm not sure she would've gone to college or finished it. She went to college because it was expected of her, and appears to have been as predictably poora student as that would lead one to expect.)

For me, most of the course are run o the mill idiots, but i am torn between the Neumanns and the Sams. These morons are so exceptional that the effectively murdered their own children to support their bullshit faith and belief in pseudo-science respectively.

This was a tough one for me, but I have to go with my state's Michelle Bachmann. After all, it was she who, nn a Dec. 29 interview on Fred Thompson's radio show with guest host Jed Babbin, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said that if the GOP were "wise," they would "allow themselves to be re-defined by the tea party movement":

Well, it’s embrace the tea party movement with full arms and hold as many open forums as they possibly can to bring people in and listen to them because the leadership right now is truly coming from the tea party movement because it is disaffected Democrats, Independents, Republicans. It’s really people who love the country and who brace what ultimately has been the mission statement of the Republican Party. If you look at the two parties, Democrat and Republican, there’s no question that the heartbeat of the tea party movement would be more in line with the mission state of the Republican party certainly than that of the Democrat party. So if the Republican Party is wise, they will allow themselves to be re-defined by the tea party movement. And I hope that that will be the case.

But with so many excellent options, I see merit in Keith's suggestion about giving the award to the whole damn year.

About Me

I am a Hot Chick living in Castle Rock, CO with my fabulous family. We have a rescue dog named "Jackson," and she's a Basenji/Shepherd mix. She's something of a head case, but we love her. I'm a U.S. Navy vet, and I currently work as an Enterprise Solutions Architect, specializing in VoIP and multimedia contact center design. I'm a Trustee for my local library, because LIBRARIES. I care about science, the U.S. Constitution and the military. I'm a tax and spend liberal in a largely red county, but I try not to be stabby about it. I like to color, I aspire to run faster than I do, and I donate knitted cold weather gear to various charities. Stupidity, cupidity and wanton assholery piss me off, and I'm more than a little soft when it comes to dogs and those who serve others. I blog about whatever I feel like. I use foul language, so if that sort of thing offends you, feel free to fuck off now - if I'm unwilling to clean up my language for my fabulous Great Auntie Margie, I'm unlikely to do so for you. Newcomers are welcome here, especially those who disagree with me, but trolling and spamming will be met with the Shovel of Doom™.